The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia is no mere roadside attraction, but a destination well worth the four-hour drive it took to get there. The Civil-War Era institution has been featured on a number of ghost-themed shows and appears in the video game Fallout 76, but you don’t need to believe in spirits to get a haunted vibe from the place.
The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum accepted patients with a wide variety of issues from 1864-1994 — from the mentally ill to alcoholics, from orphans to the violently insane. A list of acceptable reasons for admittance during the Civil-War era included “the war,” “alcoholism,” “suppressed masturbation,” and my favorite “(reading) too many novels.” The main building (called the Kirkbride) is an imposing edifice made out of hand-cut stonemasonry, but the interior corridors and rooms have peeling walls, rusting doors, and stained floors — like a decaying ruin ought.
While the guides stressed the humanitarian goals of the Asylum’s creators — seeking to cure the patients, making a floor plan with a healthy space in mind — another story runs through the history of the place. Built for 250 people, by the 1950s there were at least 2,400 in extremely overcrowded conditions. Many patients died in gruesome ways (as in, so unclean there were reports of feces on the walls) during a tuberculosis outbreak. Hydrotherapy, isolation, and painful electric shock therapy were common practices.
We took a fascinating side-tour of the “modern” (1949-1994) brutalist-styled building for the Criminally Insane, which experienced murders, riots, and escaped convicts.
If you can, make it a destination.
